Art as Politics

Chapter 5. Ceremonials, Monumental Displays, and Museumification

It was early evening in August 1995, on my second night back in the village , and I was sitting with my adopted Toraja family absently watching the national television station (TVRI) that was broadcasting around the clock in celebration of Indonesia’s fiftieth anniversary of independence. The flickering TV screen served as a backdrop to the family’s assorted activities —the younger children worked on their Indonesian citizenship class homework, while the older women folded the laundry and began preparing dinner. Across the room two local teens counted the day’s revenues from the now-booming tourist visits, and Lolo, a Ke’te’ Kesu’ carver, sat with his friends discussing the new, stricter bans on cockfighting, while cradling and stroking their favorite roosters. All activities were abruptly abandoned, however, when a brief program break commemorating Indonesian independence appeared on the screen. Entitled The Face of Indonesia, the short began with aerial views of celebrated national sites such as Java’s Borobudur and Bali’s Tanah Lot, as well as shots of picturesque Javanese villages and close-ups of tea-harvesters. Murmuring “Aduh . . . bagus” (Wow . . . great), the family members closed in around the television in time for the climax, which featured hundreds of Indonesians energetically waving enormous red-and-white flags atop a mountain peak, the flags spelling out the ubiquitous independence logo “Indonesia’s 50 Year Anniversary” (50 Tahun H.U.T. Indonesia). As soon as the segment ended, there was a burst of excited chatter. After hearty agreement that the short was a spectacular tribute to Indonesian independence, my Toraja hosts proudly noted that the hands clasping a woven bamboo basket in one of the shots were “Toraja hands.” When I asked how they knew these were not Javanese hands, one brother declared, “We know our peoples’ hands when we see them!” “But how?” I queried again, completely perplexed. Grinning slyly, one 5 Ceremonials, Monumental Displays, and Museumification 140 : chapter 5 of my foster brothers then revealed that a relative living in Jakarta had made the segment and that the televised hands were, in fact, another relative ’s hands. For the remainder of my 1995 stay in the highlands the airing of the short prompted similar reactions and discussions. It was apparent that, for my Toraja friends, this commercial not only served to emotionally inscribe a nationalist sensibility but simultaneously embodied (in a very literal sense) a local, even familial, sense of collective identity. LOCALIZING THE NATION, NATIONALIZING THE LOCAL Having examined some of the more traditional symbols of Toraja identity , this chapter will explore newer arenas in which Toraja cultural identities and memories are creatively invoked and enshrined, examining in particular the ways in which these newer displays articulate broader nationalist sensibilities and agendas. Inspired by the publication of Benedict Anderson ’s (1983) treatise on nations as “imagined communities,” anthropologists and other scholars have increasingly directed their attention to the study of nationalism as a form of consciousness. In particular, a number have begun to explore the ways in which the imagined nation becomes cemented in the everyday experiences, narratives, and memories of its diverse citizens.1 As a relatively new archipelago nation, composed of over 6,000 inhabited islands and hundreds of different ethnic and religious groups, Indonesia is particularly dedicated to enterprises designed to foster a unified national identity. Because similarly heterogeneous nations such as Yugoslavia have crumbed, and because religious tensions between Indonesian Muslims and Christians have mounted, such efforts are becoming all the more important in Indonesia. The 1995 fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence was a major occasion for the project of national historymaking . While some state-sponsored commemorative enterprises failed to resonate with local peoples, others, such as The Face of Indonesia, became vehicles for regional groups to imagine the nation as cradled in their hands, thereby commingling local and national orientations.2 To the extent that my Toraja friends were able to reinterpret a nationalistic commercial to highlight their group’s role in its production, the short was imbued with an emotional local salience. This chapter is broadly concerned with the role of Toraja cultural “displays” in local and national memory-making projects. In examining newer genres of creative display in Tana Toraja, this chapter further details how effective cultural displays embody collective memories, ceremonials, monumental displays, and museumification : 141 infusing them with emotional resonance such that these displays can serve as “affecting presences.”3 I am...